Tech Tok

Today’s mininova results have a new graphical element in them:

These icons allow users to quickly discern when a torrent that claims to be from a well-known group (e.g. eztv) is not actually from that group. These “spam torrents” can appear when new shows come out or are anticipated to come out, and clog up the internet with useless data, wasting both ISP bandwidth and everyone’s time.

Some apps that let you liberate your iPhone/iPod Touch from iTunes and Apple’s renaming obfuscation: dTunes, PwnPlayer, and MPlayer make a pretty potent combination.

MPlayer is probably the weakest of the bunch; playing video skips frames and sometimes has no audio. I would expect it to get better over time though.

Just a few more reasons to JailBreak. :-)

Screenshot from Firefly, a daapd server for AppleTV and Mac OS X

I found this on the ‘Net today, downloaded it, and set it up. It’s running happily, and I have a screen session busily copying all my mp3’s from my Mac Pro downstairs to the 1TB external drive hooked up to the AppleTV.

This is a great solution, since it means we can have a music server available all the time without having to keep my power-hungry, 4-core machine on all the time.

Apparently there is another AppleTV plugin that does BitTorrent, so I may at last be able to turn off my computer at night!

Ran across twhirl today because Seesmic bought them, and my good friend Bear is a Seesmic dev. (Hi Bear!)

It’s an Adobe Air app, which is both good and bad (Air is not open, but there are Linux and Mac versions), and seems to be the Twitter-client-du-jour.

I always do twitter-via-IM, so I’m not sure what benefits this would bring me. Perhaps Twitter IMs are a bit too interrupting, although I’ve mitigated that somewhat by setting a custom sound for twitters, by which I know I don’t have to pay attention to the IM window that has popped up.

What do other people use to Twitter? IM? Twitter-specific clients? If I was all blog-centric, I would put up a poll, but all I have are the comments below, so please add one!

PC-Gamer Jan 2008 gave Guitar Hero III a low rating because of “low frame rates”. Let me be the first to tell you this is not fair. They review Crysis in the same magazine, and that game requires serious horsepower and a new graphics card. If they had actually tried Guitar Hero III on the same system, they would get results like I do for both games on my now 2 year old AMD dual core 4200+ with the latest Saphire ATI 3870 chipset HD video card. It’s all in the video card.

I will be the first to admit that Intel was the place to be for the last 2 years, however I do not buy computers *that* frequently. I plan to upgrade soon, but not before some serious comparisons (as opposed to ridiculous speculation) come out between Intel and new AMD technology.

Anyway more to the point, with the latest video card, Guitar Hero III’s game play is amazing and the graphics are great. Yep, Crysis is good too. Sorry to break the news to you, but unless you’re in nVidia 8800 or ATI 3800 chip territory, you’ve got crap. Now upgrade and buy some games to wow yourself on your 1920×1080 flat-panel TV. Actually, a $500 Samsung 245BW 24″ 1920×1200 monitor works just fine.

One other little thing, the games utilize 5.1 sound, so be sure to grab a $70 logitech X560 or better set of speakers. (I’ve had something like that for many years, actually).

High-Def Digest reports that HBO — publishers of fine series like The Sopranos and The Wire — is dropping HD-DVD.

The dominos look to be falling, spelling the end of HD-DVD..

The original post is in Japanese, and my Google translation link may not work. I’m not sure, but this device sounds pretty incredible. It has a hefty $550 CDN price tag though (58,800Â¥), which is the price of a cheap laptop these days.

What really stood out for me was:

• component output at 1280×720 (720p)
• DivX support
• Ogg support
• AppleLossless support
• Flac support
• WMV support
• H.264 support

.. the list goes on and on. Note that the actual display is only 800×480, it’s only the component output that can support 720p.

Probably not worth the price, really, but impressive nonetheless.

Maybe they will be able to get the price down after a while, and it will get really interesting..

Microsoft is spinnging Bungie off to be an independent company again. Shane Kim, vice president of Microsoft Game Studios said “We saw ‘Halo 3′ and we were all, like, WTF? This is just Halo 2!! We are *so* *done* with them”.

Harold Ryan, talking head for Bungie was heard to cackle “Hehehehe, the plan *worked*!”

Craig reviewed “Fountain” negatively on the filmfest site here on tnir, and being the busy guy he is, has not “moderated” my comment on it yet. I have examined the trailers for the movie at FOUNTAIN @ apple in HD carefully, and with all the movies he is seeing, he can be excused for a misplaced negative review.

The moral of the movie is not just that living forever can take, well a long time, but if you are aware of Descarte’s view of God and perhaps have read, um, the first few pages of that book, what’s it’s name again? Starts with a “B”… The poetic implications on the tree of life and Aronofsky’s earlier movies becomes more clear, at least to the extent I felt I needed to mention them in a review, unlike our exhausted TIFF movie reviewer Craig. Eden & Eve were also mentioned in the movie.

I encourage you to seek out additional reviews of this movie, unless you’re philosophically challenged and feel like signing me up for “prickwear.com” again,. Btw, to whoever did it, prickwear is for liberal pricks, there’s a better one for right-wing pricks. Not too sure if there’s much of a market for T-shirts for centrist philosophers, however. Maybe “Church of the sub-genius” T’s?

We’re getting ready for a week on the road, from San Francisco to Las Vegas. We’ve already managed to get as far as San José. (7.8MB, 8:29)